Friday, October 26, 2012

The Children’s Book by A.S.Byatt

The real center of The
Children’s Book is life at the end of the Victorian era – which sounds like
too big a topic for a novel, but somehow Byatt pulls it off. She talks about
how family life at the end of the 19th century was special with an
independent life for children in an upper class family, who were often numerous
and left to themselves to wander in the woods or explore the country-house
environment where they were being raised. She makes up five families, with many
children, in which to explore her idea.

The world of children and families in the late Victorian era
is a powerful topic. The contrast between wealth and poverty and the contrast
between the rights and possibilities for men and women in Victorian society affects
each of the families in the story.
Every character struggles with his or her social and gender-caused position
and its limits. Several characters rise in status, especially Olive and Violet, a coal miner's daughters, but privileged members of the upper middle class as
adults. Olive is the matriarch of the novel’s most central family and a
successful author, and her sister Violet is the quiet unmarried aunt (but
things are not quite as they seem).

As they mature, the children of the five families develop a
variety of literary, social, artistic, and political consciousness. They are
influenced directly and indirectly by famous people who lived then – the
Fabians, suffragists, anarchists, socialists, even Emma Goldman, cultural leaders
like Rudyard Kipling, G.B.Shaw, and William Morris. The characters attend
lectures in London, Cambridge, Oxford; join real socialists and other
activists, and travel to witness conditions in other countries. They put on
plays – especially Shakespeare plays – which seem to them iconic, and whose
organization gives them experience of various sorts. (Also, it’s a typical
thing for that era’s family to do.)

The novel is full of real places and things, all made very
vivid. The father of one of the major families is a department head at the
emerging Victoria and Albert Museum in London – the museum is both physically
and conceptually central. A number of the characters gather for a visit to the
Paris World’s Fair, where they see Loie Fuller dance among other things. The
women in the novel dress up for dances and theatrical performances – the
descriptions of gowns and hats are lush and indulgent.

A counter topic to family and social life is the life of
artists. There are at least three characters who have enormous creative gifts: Benedict
Fludd a very troubled and eccentric ceramicist; his apprentice Phillip Warren,
born very poor and lower class but driven to create from his childhood; and already-mentioned
Olive Wellwood, a writer of fantastic tales encompassing the title’s “Children’s Book.”

The beauty of ceramic vessels – shape, color of glaze,
decorative elements, workmanship – and the details of the potter's craft are
described with love and attention to visual and tactile detail. Byatt makes a
great effort in explaining the many challenges in creating a pot on the wheel,
mixing a glaze, loading a kiln, and firing the contents. The characters
appreciate the beauty of pots and are aware of the history of earlier
ceramicists.

The process of writing – creating imaginary worlds, myth and
fiction, setting up characters, choosing words – and the effect of writing on
an audience are another fundamental theme. Olive’s tales begin as specific
gifts to each of her children, in some cases with a problematic effect. They
continue to become a way that she earns a living for the family – which also
causes a variety of problems for herself and her complicated relationship with
her husband.

Several of the characters struggle with understanding their
identity, which is often vexed by the complex relationships of their parents
and those who seem to be their parents. Some of the most mistreated characters
develop stong identities anyway; some of the most loved fail. Byatt manages to
subsume the identity question in other themes, mentioning often the emerging
medical specialty of psychoanalysis and creating at least two very troubled
suicides who don’t get any help in this respect.

The narrator often steps back and describes historic events
and their social consequences. Nothing is explicit, but no reader could be
unaware of the coming fate of the families whose youth are contemporaries, as
often mentioned, of Rupert Brooke. He is often present at meetings or informal
events that the fictitious characters also attend – we know what that portends.
Byatt is aware that her readers must be thinking of the First World War and
what it will do to her characters, and she’s ruthless in her final chapters,
when it happens.

I loved this book. I was amazed that with so many characters
and so much going on, Byatt always kept me on top of the family place of each
character as he or she was mentioned. The graphic horrors of the Great War were
kept at bay by the long history of the characters and their aspirations; the
inevitablilty was handled wonderfully.

1 comment:

This is one I'm pretty darned sure I'd like -- the characters sound extremely interesting, it combines my love for Victorian England with creatives and sounds quite interesting. I love it when someone writes "I loved this book." That's such a high recommendation for me. I'll definitely look into this one.

About Me

I live in Ann Arbor, Michigan, but love to travel, to live in temporary places, and to cook and eat in new places. I began blogging in 2006, and kept both a food and a travel blog through 2015. I'm now posting both food and travel at maefood.blogspot.com -- including various posts about Mona Lisa parodies, detective fiction, world literature and many other interests.